Nine is fine for Slo-Pitch

Wednesday, May 13 vs Waterloo Mennonite Brethren
With light rain falling over the supper hour, and forecasts of more rain in the evening, it didn't look promising for tonight's Slo-Pitch game. However, the rain didn't get heavier, it actually let up to sprinkles and then nothing by the last innings of our game against Waterloo Mennonite Brethren church.
Each team played with nine players tonight, down from the 12 I was expecting for our team. (Two are getting married next week, so I guess they might be busy with other things.) Cam, Cal, Scott, Mark, Mackenzie, Peter S, Peter J, Sal, and Tracy Kauffman all braved the elements.
I think that we actually have the best hitting with 9 players in the line-up. We get to bat more often, and between running, umpiring, and coaching, we are all in the game. (That's not to say that I don't like having 14 players, and we'll need everyone we can get in the summer time, I expect.) It took once through the batting order to find our stroke, but in the third inning we scored three runs, sending 8 batters to the plate. That actually tied the score, since we let in only two runs in the first, one in the second, and blanked them in the third. We added two in the fifth, with me tripling in Mark's lead-off single, and Tracy's single over the bag at third cashing me in. We also added single runs in the sixth (with Sal leading off with a triple of his own), seventh, and eighth innings. We had five or more batters in each inning except the second (4) and third (3).
Our defence played a pretty good game, except for the numerous grounders that went through my legs. Mackenzie had one particularly impressive catch on a deep fly ball to left, and Peter Jutzi hauled in a number of flies in the outfield, too. Peter Szabo used both hands to catch a liner to second, and Sal made a picture-perfect stretch at first base to catch Mark's throw from third and put out the batter. In the end, we couldn't catch the four flies that landed over the fence, and I could only catch pop-ups at shortstop, so WMB ended up with 18 runs to our 8.